Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part IV

January 5, 2024 @ 9:55 pm · Filed by under Alphabets, Borrowing

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"How Korea's alphabet is saving an Indonesian dialect", SCMP (1/4/24)

So now you can hear with your own ears and see with your own eyes whether Hangeul is a suitable alphabet for Cia-Cia.

"It ain't over till the fat lady sings."

 

Selected readings

 

[h.t. liuyao]

January 5, 2024 @ 9:55 pm · Filed by under Alphabets, Borrowing


6 Comments

  1. Ross King said,

    January 5, 2024 @ 10:39 pm

    Give me a break. If the Koreans put as much time, money, effort, and media attention into just propagating Korean–the language which their script was actually designed for–as they do on Quixotic scriptonationalistic endeavours like this to show how glorious and scientific their alphabet is (there are examples too, none particularly successful), Korean and Korean Language Education might actually find their way out of their 30-year deficit compared to Japanese (Language Education) and Chinese (Language Education). If I were a language planner in the central Indonesia government bureaucracy, I'd find this a gross interference in Indonesian language policy and a stumbling block to integrating Cia-Cia speakers with Bahasa Indonesia speakers.

  2. Max said,

    January 6, 2024 @ 4:02 am

    Well that explains why the IPA is based on Hangul. The Roman alphabet just can’t express sounds like “pha.”

  3. Philip Taylor said,

    January 6, 2024 @ 5:31 am

    I found both of the above comments depressingly cynical, but let me respond to just the final point — « The Roman alphabet just can’t express sounds like “pha” ». The sound the speaker makes sounds nothing like /fɑː/ or /fæ/ (the two most likely realisations of "pha" in British English), so the fact that he is forced to transcribe it as "pha" surely demonstrates his point, does it not ?

  4. Mehmet Oguz Derin said,

    January 7, 2024 @ 10:24 am

    During and after learning to read and write Hangeul over time, the delicate balance the Hangeul script achieves for layout made a great impression on me, especially witnessing how much space it saves even when I write Turkish with Hangeul. Even just with such merit, I believe it could be an excellent choice for language preservation.

  5. M Wang said,

    January 15, 2024 @ 5:06 am

    > The sound the speaker makes sounds nothing like /fɑː/ or /fæ/ (the two most likely realisations of "pha" in British English), so the fact that he is forced to transcribe it as "pha" surely demonstrates his point, does it not?

    I would not use modern English orthography as a starting point for guessing what some spelling pronounces to, especially not the digraph .

    The actual Cia-Cia Latin orthography doesn't really have a "pha" — we are looking at a transcription artifact of SCMP. There is a three way distinction between [p] [b] [ɓ] according to Wikipedia, which according to the Latin orthography on the same page is written p, bh, b. Same for [ɗ] (d), [d] (dh), and [t] (t). That would indeed depart from standard Indonesian orthography and lead to some confusion.

  6. M Wang said,

    January 15, 2024 @ 6:02 am

    Another thing. This video should not be fully attributed to the SCMP; it incorporates a lot of interview from AFP. Agence France-Presse also published a text version of this video that gets copied a lot on news websites (one link is https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/12/20/asia-pacific/social-issues/indigenous-indonesians-korean-dialect/). AFP was also one of the first to break the news back in August 2009. They are evidently very devoted to this story.

    One thing that itches me is that the video only shows that Abidin's project is alive without talking about its scale. You'd want some measure of success, right?

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